As a number of commentators have noted, the so-called War on Terror is not a war in the traditional sense. However this need not mean, to paraphrase Baudrillard, that "the War on Terror did not take place". Others have spoken of the emergence of a new kind of war, a non-traditional form of war, particularly in the last years of the 20th century (see Kaldor 1997; Gilbert 2003; Gray 2003). This paper aims to discuss some of the features of this new kind of war, as exemplified in the War on Terror, and to link it with Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics'.